When it comes to the 6 Nations, in recent years the fixtures guys have done well making sure the final weekend sees the big deciders. Tomorrow’s England-Ireland show-down – on St Patrick’s Day! – should be no exception. The Irish have already won the Championship; but now they hope to win the Triple Crown, and claim the Grand Slam for just the third time since the tournament began.

The English will be out to stop that happening. Ireland thumped the champions last year in the final game, denying them the clean sweep (just as they had in 2001 and again in 2011), and this year England’s quest for a third consecutive 6 Nations championship was brought to an early and embarrassing halt – so a bit of reciprocal spoiling is to be expected. (It’s mutual. An Ulster friend sent round a chart two weeks ago, explaining how the English might yet come last.)

I have a little skin in the game. Or blood, at least. My great-grandfather, James ‘Jim’ Sealy (19 March 1876 – 4 February 1949), played this very fixture back in 1896, and scored a try – on debut.

Reporting on ‘A Splendid and Exciting Game’, the (English) Athletic News lamented how from the off the English ‘had a terribly warm time defending… and the wild, energetic rushes of the Irishmen were too much for the phlegmatic Englishmen.’ Penalties were missed, and Brian Moore would no-doubt be amused to know that ‘scrummaging of a loose and scrambling character was indulged in’. Before half-time, however, ‘the Fates smiled upon their [Irish] efforts… when Lee dashed along to the English line, and handing to Sealy at the right moment, gave that youth the opportunity of scoring a try near the posts.’ The English rallied in the second half, but somehow managed to run their only try into the dead-ball area. And so it was that Ireland won ‘a brilliant victory by the following score: Ireland 2 goals (10 points) – England 1 dropped goal (4 points)’. The ‘Critical Comments’ that followed might be fairly classed as poetry.

Pace yer man at the Athletic News, though, that year the Irish did not crack the Triple Crown. They drew with Scotland, 0-0, two weeks later.

A Dubliner born and bred, and captain of the Dublin University team (1898-99), my father’s granddad on his mother’s side played eight more times for Ireland from 1896 to 1900 (W5, L2, D2), during which time the Irish won outright two of three completed championships (there was some rum business about Welsh ‘professionalism’ in 1897 and ’98…).

As the ‘Grand Slam’ per se did not exist until the French joined, the Triple Crown – for beating all the other Home nations – was the equivalent achievement. Ireland won it, for the second time in five years, in 1899, James Sealy helping to defeat Wales in the last fixture, in front of an uncontrollable 40,000 crowd at Cardiff Arms Park. In the entire course of their tournament the Irish had conceded just a single penalty – the first time one had been awarded for tackling the man without the ball.

In his first year as an international, Sealy also joined the British Lions tour of South Africa (W3, L1), playing alongside eight of his fellow Irishmen, including the ‘psychopathic’ Tom Crean (not the Antarctic explorer) and Robert Johnston, both of whom then chose to remain in the country, as doctors, and both won VCs in the Second Boer War. (Sealy did not stay, but years later sent his daughter Brenda there, to marry my grandfather, Gerald Spence Smyth. And thus, eventually, to me.)

Evidently a man of more than passing sporting talent, aside from prowess on the rugby field (where he’s listed as a ‘forward’, in an era when perhaps they were shaped somewhat differently!), he represented Ireland at hockey, and played golf off a plus-3 handicap. In the summer of 1900 he also played in a 3-day game between Dublin University and ‘Marylebone Cricket Club in Ireland’. (Batting – or not – at No.9, he scored 9* and dnb; no bowling. I like to think he might have been the wicket-keeper.)

Presumably at some point Sealy also did a bit of studying. Hanging up his boots, he went on to be a well-regarded barrister, KC, and judge. In 1930 the London Times contained a nib to the effect that he’d been presented with a pair of white gloves, ‘symbols of the lack of crime in the county’ (or, more accurately, a lack of brutal sentencing). He seems also to have had the standard Irish sense of humour – telling an ex-Legionnaire who had been arrested for pulling a gun on a policeman, ‘I think the air here must be bad for you’ – although the records show at least one counsel ended up in contempt for calling the His (Protestant) Honour ‘the seed and breed of Cromwell’.

Yeats would come round to the family home for tea, as would the first President of Ireland, Douglas Hyde. When his first wife, Stella, died, Sealy – known throughout the family as ‘the Da’ – married Hyde’s daughter Una. All parties, sooner or later, had their portraits done by Sarah Purser, a middle-distant cousin.

In 1928 ‘Judge Sealy’ was elected President of the Irish Rugby Football Union. In the playroom where the young me watched 5 Nations matches while my father polished shoes, there is a framed touch-judge’s flag embroidered ‘France v Ireland’. A minor masterpiece of cockerels and shamrocks, we have one side of it, our surviving uncle has the other. My aunt in Perth, Australia, has the blackthorn stick that it was waved from.

James Sealy lived just long enough to see Ireland win their first Grand Slam, in 1948. As for his playing days, it is established family lore (passed on by one John Beckett, cousin of Samuel and Guinness underbrewer) that Sealy did not merely ‘score’ a run-in try against the English, but that he “crossed the line, festooned with Saxons!” This may well be apocryphal; but it reflects, I think, on a more eloquent time, when all players were not simply credited with having made ‘the hard yards’.

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For The Oldie, in a different edit

Buccmaster believes the old gods built the Roman roads and talks about ‘angland’ in a time when much of the population has only just finished being Danish. He has no truck with ‘cyngs’ and does not answer Harald’s call to Hastings. But when ‘geeyome the bastard’ arrives with his punitive taxes and rapacious knights, Buccmaster finds himself inspired to launch a violent rebellion against legal, financial and cultural annihilation.

History will not permit that he succeed, of course, so perhaps it does not much matter that Buccmaster is delusional, cowardly, and generally a disastrous leader. But his political objections are entirely legitimate, not least regarding a people’s access to their native language: ‘all that we is is bean tacan from us’. It has been a long time since Buccmaster’s descendants had cause to view themselves as victims of a conquest, but this remarkable feat of literary sympathy puts us right back in his apocalyptic vision of the end times for ancient England.

Rather more recent British history repeats itself in Randall (Galley Beggar Press 317pp £11), Jonathan Gibbs’s scathing pseudo-memoir of the Young British Artists and the art market under Cool Britannia. In a parallel artiverse where Damien Hirst died in the late 1980s, Ian ‘Randall’ Timkins has taken the London contemporary scene by storm, selling ‘holographs’ to the rich and famous derived from their own used toilet paper. He and his circle hang out in the pubs around Goldsmiths, attend events they ‘affect to despise’ and say profound things like, ‘There’s only two things you can do with art: make it, and buy it.’

Randall and his retinue occupy a milieu that’s equal parts Geoff Dyer and Bret Easton Ellis, and if the overall tone is just a fraction too refined for a City-boy narrator whose idea of culture was once a ‘signed and framed’ poster of Cindy Crawford, it’s a credit to Gibbs’s writing (and the YBAs) that you don’t need to have paid any conscious attention to the art world over the last twenty years for all of this to still feel familiar. If you can only put up with the slightly obnoxious characters, in fact, Randall is ideal for those who already dismiss most contemporary art as just so much Merda d’artista.

Aaron Thier’s The Ghost Apple (Bloomsbury 289pp £16.99) belongs to the more full-blown variety of satire. Tripoli College, a fourth-rate New England liberal arts institution – established for the betterment of ‘Indian Scholiasts’ – has been hit hard by the financial crisis, thanks largely to its overexposure to the company that manufactures Monopoly money. The college forms a new ‘partnership’ with Big Anna® Brands, a snack-food corporation, the ethical commitments of which include ‘the introduction of clean Human Power™ plow technology’ on its Caribbean plantation estates. One of these is the island of St Renard, where Tripoli’s ‘Field Studies Program in Tropical Agriculture’ enables politically engaged students of all creeds and colours to experience life in a Big Anna® republic.

With his merciless spoofing of course-listing gobbledygook and ‘brand history’ bullshit, Thier’s hectic assemblage of prospectuses, slave narratives, ‘Scandal Vulnerability Assessments’ and insane (but basically verbatim) Victorian health advice marks him out as a potential successor to the late lamented Tom Sharpe, and reaches a new high – which is to say low – for the satirical campus novel.

In Deepti Kapoor’s A Bad Character (Jonathan Cape 234pp £14.99) a young woman from Delhi comes into adulthood at the turn of the millennium, amid a human geography of cyber-boom and rampant development but also abysmal poverty, corruption and obsession with the country’s nuclear neighbour. One of a generation of schoolgirls who were told that they would be ‘the future of India’ but still find it unsafe to go out at night without ‘a man and a car or a car and a gun’, she sidesteps her aunt’s incessant attempts to marry her off and begins a turbulent physical relationship with an ‘ugly’ young man with whom she makes eye contact one day in a busy restaurant. He is the first person she has met who lives on his own, and he becomes her guide to parts of the city that have been thus far inaccessible.

Although the story is not exactly a happy one, the boldness of our protagonist is redeeming: in a setting one expects to be peopled with trapped or defeated women, her determination to forge her own genuine, personal experiences (however painful) is important. Kapoor’s prose, though, is a bit over-wrought and self-consciously modernist in places, and her whistle-stop tour of what should be the seamier aspects of the Indian capital occasionally seems to be ticking boxes (‘Lutyens’ Delhi’; ‘monumental grandeur’) for the ‘international’ audience.

In The Scatter Here is Too Great (Jonathan Cape 203pp £14.99), Bilal Tanweer does a better job of maintaining the flavour of something from another culture. Nine interlinked stories – focusing, in threes, on ‘A Writer in the City’, an old communist poet and a young man who steals cars from defaulting bank customers – orbit at various distances around a bomb blast at Cantt Station in central Karachi. In delivering these disparate viewpoints and dimensions of big-city life, Tanweer purposefully encourages an element of narrative opacity and incoherence. But although each individual strand is not without interest, no one section is particularly substantial or rewarding, and the book as a whole struggles to generate much momentum. Ondaatje-esque reflections appear here and there in support of Tanweer’s approach – ‘True stories are fragments. Anything longer is a lie, a fabrication’ – but, bluntly put, this collection could have done with a little more fabricating.

No such complaint could possibly be levelled at Zia Haider Rahman’s In the Light of What We Know (Picador 555pp £16.99). ‘As a child,’ announces one of his Sebaldian co-narrators, ‘I maintained the expectation that obscure and difficult things would be discussed.’ Rahman satisfies that expectation in spades and with considerable control and polish. On one level, this is the story of two boys from different sides of the tracks and, indeed, from different sides of what used to be East and West Pakistan, who meet at Oxford in the late 1980s and then go on to work in high finance until one loses interest, retrains as a human rights lawyer and ends up in Afghanistan.

On another level, this book is a colossal investigation of the difference between seeing and knowing and understanding, taking in geopolitics, the banking crisis, black swans, NGOs, game theory, the British education system, cartography, war, primatology, (post-)imperialism, Christopher Hitchens, carpentry, Glyndebourne, translation, naval pennants, cognitive sciences, literature, black holes and Bath Olivers. Deeply insightful and limitlessly quotable, this is the kind of book every novelist dreams of writing and no first-timer should ever have had the chutzpah to attempt. As Rahman’s own narrator says, somewhat flagrantly: ‘nothing in his account was out of place, nothing extraneous, even if at times it seemed incomplete and obtuse.’

The same cannot be said of Sarah Perry’s After Me Comes the Flood (Serpent’s Tail 232pp £11.99). One drought-ridden summer John Cole shuts up his bookshop, gets lost driving out of London, breaks down and ends up being invited into an unofficial lunatic asylum, the occupants of which, for some reason, believe they were expecting him. He stays a week. Why? He is frustrated, even scared, by his new companions (Perry is good at the tiny details of mistrust and uncertainty); he thinks they are all lying to him; they are. But he doesn’t leave. Is he perhaps there for his own treatment? We are not vouchsafed an explanation.

Thanks to the litter of symbols and portents (think Henry James rewired by Murakami, or Virginia Woolf directing a sequel to The Village), After Me Comes the Flood consistently feels like it’s about to have a lot going for it. But there’s ultimately no pay-off, leaving the impression that it was all just an exercise in atmosphere.

None of that airy ambiguity in Katherine Faw Morris’s Young God (Granta Books 195pp £12.99). When her skeezy mother dies falling into a ‘witch-tit freezing’ river, trailer-park teenager Nikki decides to take control of her life and sets about making something of herself – specifically, a drug dealer. In two hundred short, violent and often unpleasantly sexual pages Nikki goes about her emotionally lobotomised progress, smoking Kool menthol cigarettes (‘the best thing that’s ever been in her mouth’), shaving herself like a porn star and responding to should-be major life events with a perfunctory ‘Oh’.

The basic so-what-ishness of the ending is perhaps unavoidable, given the context. But Morris’s punchy and unwavering style is absolutely of a piece with her unforgiving environment of post-Palahniuk white-trash girl-power – with guns. And fuchsia end-papers.

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For Literary Review